1. Field of the Invention
One or more embodiments of the present invention relates to a device for receiving and handling goods or products, and more particularly to a rotatable device for input and output of goods or products in a storage system.
2. Description of Related Art
In today's society, both privately and in the business sector, the consumption of goods is increasing at a great rate. A number of producers and commercial organizations have therefore adopted different storage systems for their goods and/or products. Because manual retrieval of goods and/or products in such a storage system is time-consuming considering that a single customer order might comprise a large number of different goods and/or products, storage systems of this kind are more or less automated. The storage installations are computer-controlled, with a number of robots being employed for finding and retrieving the various goods and/or products. The retrieved goods and/or products are delivered to receiving stations in the storage system, whereupon an operator will pack the goods and dispatch them according to the individual customer's orders.
Different kinds of automation are previously known of such stores, especially for retrieval of units from a store of this kind. In American U.S. Pat. No. 5,147,176 an automated storage system is described, where goods items are assigned a random position in the system, and where a computer program keeps a continuous record of the individual goods items' position in the system. The storage system further comprises storage shelves, where the stored goods items are arranged in storage boxes in the storage shelves. Between the storage shelves access passages will be provided, and cranes or hoisting devices will then transfer the storage boxes to wagons which will transport them to a packing station.
Another storage system is described in the European patent EP 767.113 B1, where a robot system is employed for placing or removing goods items in or from the storage system. The goods items are arranged vertically in stacks, and a robot can lift the goods items vertically by means of a gripping device in order to remove them from the stack.
U.S. Pat. No. 2,701,065 describes a system for handling and storing containers holding various products and/or goods. The containers are arranged in vertical columns or stacks. Two separate hoisting devices are employed in order to retrieve a single container from a column or stack. The container will then be delivered to a receiving and handling station, whereupon products and/or goods can be transferred to a vehicle.
The above storage system has made the retrieval process of the various goods items faster and more efficient, while reducing errors in the retrieval of the goods items. However, the storage systems will be of such a nature that a “bottleneck” will be created at the storage systems' packing stations or delivery stations, thereby causing delays in the packing of the goods items, because the systems will only be able to deliver one storage container at a time to a packing station or delivery station. When the operator has picked out the relevant goods item from the storage container, the storage container will be returned to the storage shelf or stack by means of the robot, crane or hoisting device, whereupon a new storage container is produced and delivered at the packing station or delivery station. This process is repeated until all the goods items have been picked out and packed ready for dispatch.